rethinking marketing

Tag Archives: budget

@hvsvn has taken his luggage complaints with BA to Twitter by creating, as @hvsvn just revealed, a $1000 Twitter campaign by buying a promoted tweet. With the campaign statistics attached, one can only imagine the type of flurry this is going to spark over the coming days.

Redbull’s Stratos campaign has set a new dimension of campaign and social engagement with consumers around the world. It also sparked discussion about the terms paid, owned, earned and shared media, however seldom has somebody questioned if the reach for the stars and current campaign scopes are still in line with resource theories of the firm. I argue they are not, excess capital holdings allow certain organizations to device campaign stunts, driven by eager agencies to score the next big thing, without establishing a full campaign to business objective link.

> Is the race for the most extreme campaign to gain a healthy and sustainable race?

> Is it just too easy to spend money on paid media to get audience attention through extreme campaigns vs. meaningful content stimulation throughout the customer journey?

> Are campaigns like Stratos and Axe Apollo really justifiable beyond the hype of press and bloggers? Shouldn’t we as marketers not look beyond total reach and claim target audience reach in meaningful numbers? What is it that we achieve with campaigns? Can we create meaningful links towards the bottom line? I argue big media allows us to do so but at the same time introduces campaign limits.

> As most marketing organisations are setup as cost-centres, don’t we have an obligation towards stakeholders and the firm to justify our spending even more so these days?

> Are we just making use of aggregated fluffy terms like earned or shared media to hide behind walls of agency influence and ego stipulation to have the biggest campaign? Does size really matter in that sense?

Paid, earned, owned and shared isn’t what is seems like – we need to dig deeper:

If we spend $20m on a campaign and estimate to reach x number of people on the premise of paid media, y number of people on the premise of owned and z number of people on the premise of earned and zz number of people on the premise of shared; do we really measure what is meaningful to the brand, to the bottom line and to our budget responsibility? Shouldn’t we segregate reach into current customer reach and potential customer reach, furthermore increase in sustainable purchase effects and short term campaign spikes? Furthermore, I argue that smart data allows us to construct a media model which assigns values to each theoretical nod, we can start to differentiate between dead-end reach, multiplication reach and bottom line effective reach.

Multiplication reach: non-current or non-potential customer with a value generation network degree, e.g. one or more nods are either customers or potential customers

Bottom line effect reach: the total of current and potential customers reached through the conglomeration of paid, owned and shared. This number should be in a healthy relation to both substitute media spendings (e.g. $ effort) and also the total number of people reached. If we assume our target reach is equal to a sample population, the sample to total population ratio becomes a statistical ratio and the marketer’s task is to find the sweet spot instead of trying to cover the entire population to also reach the target group by intersection effects.